favorite childhood games
Posted: Tue Dec 28, 2010 4:13 am
Over the holidays I've had some time to replay old games, and got to thinking about what made them so special to me.
There are some games that I hold an almost sacred reverence for... they've stuck with me. Usually, I played them during a formative part of my childhood -when I was first learning to read, or think creatively, or appreciate science fiction, etc. I still have dreams about them from time to time, and just the virtue of me thinking about them and exploring them in my dreams has turned them into something far greater than the simple game they actually are.
Interestingly enough, these aren't necessarily the greatest games I've played, or even *good* games, they're simply games that have had a huge influence on me for whatever reason.
For me, those games are:
Solar Winds. It's probably the first open ended space exploration game I played, and for some reason, I constantly have dreams set in the Solar Winds universe, where I fly around the different solar systems in the game (and sometimes make up new ones) and have adventures. If I ever got bored/unlazy enough to make my own game, I'd make a Solar Winds Tribute.
Super Solvers: Ancient Empires, Gizmos and Gadgets, Outnumbered! and Midnight Rescue. They all feature the same hero and villain, and kind of occupy the same spot in my recollections. I'm always surprised and a little saddened playing through them again to realize how small the caves/school/factory is, in my memories they're always HUGE. Especially Gizmos and Gadgets.
Treasure Mountain. Probably the first computer game I was able to play proficiently (after Nibbles and Gorillas), I still have very indepth dreams about exploring the tree house in game.
Tyrian. One of my all time favorite games, it's actually also one of the best games I've ever played. It's just that good. I still love playing through episode 1 on arcade mode, it was a blast when I was a kid, and it's still just as fun nowadays.
Dungeons of the Unforgiven. God knows why I love this game so much. Every time I play it, I get ridiculously frustrated and break shit... until I get a good character and play for 10 hours straight. I love to hate it, but even more so, I love to love it. It's like crack to me, it has been since I was 7 or 8 years old.
Ken's Labyrinth. The first 3D shooter I ever played. While most people have fond childhood memories of Wolf3D or Doom or, perhaps nowadays, Half Life, it's Ken's Labyrinth that does it for me. It's got the perfect mixture of goofiness and lucid level design that make playing it feel somewhat dreamlike.
ZZT. This is a little weird, since more properly ZZT is a game creation system rather than a game itself. I remember being 4 and 5 years old, playing the original ZZT games, and watching my older sister play them. Later, between the ages of 10 and 14, I played over 500 ZZT games. None of them were good (not even Death
), and some of them were downright terrible. What made them so appealing was almost all of them were made by people my age, with the oldest ZZTers being 16, 17 years old.
The games were made by children, and I treasured them because for the for the first time I had a window into the minds of other people my age... they told stories which probably only make sense to other children, because they were about things children care about, the questions we didn't know how to ask, the frustrations and the deep loneliness. They lacked the dumbed down language and cardboard characters of works made for children by adults, or the kind of saccharine stupidity of "stories by children" that actually get published in magazines or books. These games were raw and real, and usually incredibly stupid, and often cliched and stolen from other works, and occasionally profound. It's impossible to explain what they meant to me fully, because anyone reading this who goes and downloads a few ZZT games to see what I'm talking about will be disappointed by a bunch of 256 color ASCII characters running around badly designed game worlds with loads of typos, bugs, and/or profanity.
Anyway...
I realize not everyone here had such a deep connection to the games they played as a kid, and some dosraider of the people here are so old they didn't even *have* games as a kid, they just sat in a chair and stared at the wall all day. But I'd love to hear some of your favorite games.
There are some games that I hold an almost sacred reverence for... they've stuck with me. Usually, I played them during a formative part of my childhood -when I was first learning to read, or think creatively, or appreciate science fiction, etc. I still have dreams about them from time to time, and just the virtue of me thinking about them and exploring them in my dreams has turned them into something far greater than the simple game they actually are.
Interestingly enough, these aren't necessarily the greatest games I've played, or even *good* games, they're simply games that have had a huge influence on me for whatever reason.
For me, those games are:
Solar Winds. It's probably the first open ended space exploration game I played, and for some reason, I constantly have dreams set in the Solar Winds universe, where I fly around the different solar systems in the game (and sometimes make up new ones) and have adventures. If I ever got bored/unlazy enough to make my own game, I'd make a Solar Winds Tribute.
Super Solvers: Ancient Empires, Gizmos and Gadgets, Outnumbered! and Midnight Rescue. They all feature the same hero and villain, and kind of occupy the same spot in my recollections. I'm always surprised and a little saddened playing through them again to realize how small the caves/school/factory is, in my memories they're always HUGE. Especially Gizmos and Gadgets.
Treasure Mountain. Probably the first computer game I was able to play proficiently (after Nibbles and Gorillas), I still have very indepth dreams about exploring the tree house in game.
Tyrian. One of my all time favorite games, it's actually also one of the best games I've ever played. It's just that good. I still love playing through episode 1 on arcade mode, it was a blast when I was a kid, and it's still just as fun nowadays.
Dungeons of the Unforgiven. God knows why I love this game so much. Every time I play it, I get ridiculously frustrated and break shit... until I get a good character and play for 10 hours straight. I love to hate it, but even more so, I love to love it. It's like crack to me, it has been since I was 7 or 8 years old.
Ken's Labyrinth. The first 3D shooter I ever played. While most people have fond childhood memories of Wolf3D or Doom or, perhaps nowadays, Half Life, it's Ken's Labyrinth that does it for me. It's got the perfect mixture of goofiness and lucid level design that make playing it feel somewhat dreamlike.
ZZT. This is a little weird, since more properly ZZT is a game creation system rather than a game itself. I remember being 4 and 5 years old, playing the original ZZT games, and watching my older sister play them. Later, between the ages of 10 and 14, I played over 500 ZZT games. None of them were good (not even Death
), and some of them were downright terrible. What made them so appealing was almost all of them were made by people my age, with the oldest ZZTers being 16, 17 years old.The games were made by children, and I treasured them because for the for the first time I had a window into the minds of other people my age... they told stories which probably only make sense to other children, because they were about things children care about, the questions we didn't know how to ask, the frustrations and the deep loneliness. They lacked the dumbed down language and cardboard characters of works made for children by adults, or the kind of saccharine stupidity of "stories by children" that actually get published in magazines or books. These games were raw and real, and usually incredibly stupid, and often cliched and stolen from other works, and occasionally profound. It's impossible to explain what they meant to me fully, because anyone reading this who goes and downloads a few ZZT games to see what I'm talking about will be disappointed by a bunch of 256 color ASCII characters running around badly designed game worlds with loads of typos, bugs, and/or profanity.
Anyway...
I realize not everyone here had such a deep connection to the games they played as a kid, and some dosraider of the people here are so old they didn't even *have* games as a kid, they just sat in a chair and stared at the wall all day. But I'd love to hear some of your favorite games.
Also all the early Apogee games, like Pharaoh's Tomb, KROZ, Crystal Caves, etc ...